10TH APRIL 2025

RECORD 24

HAVE YOU HEARD OF DINARA?

Being included in the New East programme at Barbican in 2018 among just 5 or so films that had to represent pioneering (and less known) Russian cinema, basing off its monumental Soviet heritage (let's decide together here that by Russian I mean a geographical place and not the ethnic group). Alongside the generational musts as Balabanov's Brother (1997) that represented realities of St. Petersburg of the 1990s and the scandalous theatre-play-turned-film The Student(2016). This programme also screened Boys (1983), a feature drama directed by Dinara Asanova. The film portrays the 1980s in Soviet Russia and is a social drama following a number of troubled boys that instead of a juvenile detention centre are given a second chance for a normal life under the leadership of the summer camp director Pavel Vasiliyevich. Boys (1983) is one of the last films in Asanova's unpredictably short career and appears as the brightest for foreign critics. The film director masterfully switches between the fictional story and some documentary footage. No wonder this film was the choice for the programme, focusing as it seemed on boyhood in Russia.



Her filmmaking journey started here (well, almost). As many contemporaries of her generation that stayed in cinema history, Dinara moved to Moscow to study at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography; and as she pointed out, her main influences became her school master there, a Soviet film director Mikhail Romm (interesting fact! a trained sculptor from the legendary a non-existent-now art school VKhUTEMAS in Moscow) and a fellow-graduate Georgian legend Otar Ioseliani, who was a part of the Thaw generation of artists and filmmakers in the USSR of the 1960s. Dinara’s films notably address very Soviet qualities with their roots in Soviet social realism (hence I'd presume, the link to Romm) such as civil consciousness and humanism but in the new realities across 1970-1990 and predominantly in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Aimed to tell stories about real people, and not the Soviet tropes (as before), the films she directed were very in demand with teenagers inundating the director with their letters seeking answers on how she knew their lives so well and how they could sign up to be in her class. A remark referencing the outnumbered adults in her films, who are siding with and guiding the main characters in the stories she adapted to screen, who happened to be educators. Funnily, Asanova said herself that her parents had hopes for her to become an teacher, when she was very firm and determined since a young age to be involved in filmmaking. She pursued that as soon as she turned 16 and persuaded the film studio in her native Frunze (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) to hire her, which, of course, they did.

Her first feature film, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974), was released by a Leningrad-based film studio (which was Lenfilm). Her final year short Rudolfio (1969) was extremely provocative, although a very sincere story based on the work of a Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin. This was a risk that led to Mosfilm not hiring her, even despite receiving a distinction for her directing degree from the best film school in the country. Leaving a top of her class student jobless for over a number of years. The early 1970s marked a pitiful lack of films on teenagers, with the older films not being relevant anymore to the current youngsters and the newly released represented only a picture-perfect version that society expected young people to be. Asanova was keen on diving into the complexities of what adolescence could be and exploring outsiders that the teenagers were to the general community on their terms. So the script of Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974) that the studio gave her really resonated with Dinara in its honest and raw ways of depicting young people.



Breaking the boundaries of authenticity and insisting on filmmaking being a collaborative process, Asanova let the teen actors improvise and figure their words by setting the situations from the script, rather than making them recite the lines. Being read the whole script just once and encouraged to speak their words when on set, the young actors came up with lines that were pretty much as they were in the script by Yuri Klepikov, which was a surprising discovery for the film crew. As a novelty and an extension of the collective attempt creating an authentic world, the director of cinematography Dmitri Dolinin suggested capturing Leningrad in a different way. It is hard to see the former Imperial capital in there, with the lack of the glorious postcard frames and excessive golden domes. Rather trying to chase the mood of the ever-changing state with endless roads, railways and the city white noise, depicting the crossroads that the characters are at. Nevertheless, Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches (1974) has a very warm feel, which reads in the eyes of the teacher Tatyana Petrovna (played by Ekaterina Vasilyeva) and already has some nostalgic feel to the housing block of the main character Seva (a.k.a. Mukha, translated as fly in Russian). Almost stating that childhood is being left behind for him, turning it into a memory like a lost-and-found film photograph. For this, Dinara Asanova confessed her personal nostalgic feelings over her childhood community house yard in Frunze, where she was involved in many theatrical and community-related initiatives.








The film was a huge success and, at last, Asanova found home and creative allies in Leningrad. Her second feature was a more layered story having a few focal points. We have a group of senior classmates, who are misfits to society as not being children nor yet adults, then their literature teacher, who appears as a very progressive and idealistic misfit in different ways (along with the fact that she is a divorcée) and, finally, a new school principal, an army officer, who tries to get to the bottom of things with an ultimately fair judgement. The Key That Should Not Be Handed On (1976) deals with complex and clearly generational conflicts, hearing out all the parties, including the rest of the teachers and parents, observing, studying them and letting these people take as much of the screen time as they need. As a filmmaker who existed on the borderline of the passing Thaw and the Stagnation Era, Dinara also captured the heroes of the time and Leningrad-based masters of their arts, almost slipping again into the documentary field capturing the time she was witnessing. For instance, with casting legendary Soviet poet Bulat Okudzhava for this film.



Interestingly, throughout her life,  Dinara Asanova wrote fairytales addressed primarily at discovering feelings and fears mixing Turkic mythological notions (as Temir-Khan, where temir or timertranslates as iron in many Turkic languages) mixed with more defined and contemporary (to a certain extent) characters. In her diaries, she mentioned a possibility for this peculiar ability to dream to come from her Tatar grandmother, referring to a long-lasting nomadic tradition of storytelling. Similarly, Asanova had always pointed out that she wasn't attempting to make films just for a specific audience as her goal and interest was in depicting personality and characters more than their class or subculture, appealing to bigger and simpler notions of humanism as a way to have the audience's trust to bring up important topics. That still prominently exist in the cities and places we live wherever we go, keeping Dinara’s life work relevant as ever. 



Interestingly, throughout her life,  Dinara Asanova wrote fairytales addressed primarily at discovering feelings and fears mixing Turkic mythological notions (as Temir-Khan, where temir or timertranslates as iron in many Turkic languages) mixed with more defined and contemporary (to a certain extent) characters. In her diaries, she mentioned a possibility for this peculiar ability to dream to come from her Tatar grandmother, referring to a long-lasting nomadic tradition of storytelling. Similarly, Asanova had always pointed out that she wasn't attempting to make films just for a specific audience as her goal and interest was in depicting personality and characters more than their class or subculture, appealing to bigger and simpler notions of humanism as a way to have the audience's trust to bring up important topics. That still prominently exist in the cities and places we live wherever we go, keeping Dinara’s life work relevant as ever.

FILMS METIONED:
BROTHER (1997) DIR. BY ALEKSEI BALABANOV
THE STUDENT (2016) DIR. BY KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV
BOYS (1983) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA
WOODPECKERS DON’T GET HEADACHES (1974) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA
THE KEYS THAT SHOULD NOT BE HANDED ON (1975) DIR. BY DINARA ASANOVA